*Think the Guardian is a vibrant newspaper property based on all of its scoops and its digital chops and all of that? That would be a mistaken impression:

The newspaper, its Sunday sister, the Observer, and their digital operations recorded operating losses (before tax and exceptional items) of nearly £37m in the year to April 2011, up from £32.5m the previous year. A still bigger loss is expected to be announced for 2011-2012. Andrew Miller, chief executive of the paper’s parent company, Guar­dian Media Group, warned staff in 2011 that the company “could run out of cash in three to five years” and repeated in February this year that the financial position was “not sustainable”.

Thanks to technological change and a prolonged recession, all newspapers face falling sales, declining revenues and an uncertain future. The Guardian’s position, however, is unusually critical. Its chief source of advertising income — public-sector job vacancies — has collapsed, wiping out an annual £40m in revenue.

*Limits! What happens when a provider gives readers an “incredibly bounded set of content”?

The Huffington Post’s model of collaborating with unpaid bloggers to produce much of its content has produced some controversy in Spain. El Confidencial reports on a statement made by the Press Association of Madrid, which read “we maintain that journalists have to be paid for their work.” The Association objects that the Huffington Post “is going to monetize the content, but the journalists won’t see a euro.” The hashtag #gratisnotrabajo (I don’t work for free) is being used to discuss the issue on Twitter.

We continue to live in perilous times, making investigative journalism as essential to our democracy as the Watergate stories were. However, the impact of digital media and dramatic shifts in audience and advertising revenue have undermined the financial model that subsidized so much investigative reporting during the economic golden age of newspapers, the last third of the 20th century. Such reporting remains a high priority at many financially challenged papers, which continue to produce accountability journalism that matters to their communities — but they have far fewer staff members and resources to devote to it. Meanwhile, much of the remaining investigative reporting on television stations and networks, which also are struggling to maintain audience and revenue, consists of consumer-protection and crime stories that drive ratings.

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Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.